The Big Lead

Rob Dauster Lit Billy Gillispie And Tarleton State on Fire in Blistering Column

By Ryan Phillips

Billy Gillispie coaches the Texas A&M Aggies against the Oklahoma Sooners
Billy Gillispie coaches the Texas A&M Aggies against the Oklahoma Sooners / Ed Zurga/Getty Images
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Billy Gillispie has been hired as the new head coach at Tarleton State and Rob Dauster is not happy about it. The NBC Sports writer went off on the school's decision to hire Gillispie, calling it "shameful." It's safe to say the parties will not be exchanging Christmas cards this year.

Dauster believes Gillispie should never coach basketball at any level because, "he’s abusive, he’s manipulative, he treats the people in his program horrifically and you can never be quite sure when his next drunk driving arrest is going to happen."

Damn.

Dauster points out Gillispie's three drunk driving arrests and the fact that Kentucky forced him to have a driver when he was the school's basketball coach because the school didn't trust him to drive sober.

His positively blistering column continues:

"Every stop that he has been along the way, there are stories about the way that he treats players, his assistant coaches and the people he interacts with around the program every day. There was the time at Kentucky he made Josh Harrellson sit in a bathroom stall during halftime because he was 'playing like s***,' or the time he made Harrellson ride home from a road game in a van with the team managers. There was the time at Texas A&M that he made a player break up with the girl he was dating — a booster’s daughter — on the charter flight home from a game, in front of the girl’s family."

- Rob Dauster

I knew Gillispie was an awful person but had forgotten all the specifics. He went on to detail Gillispie's endless abuse of players and staff at Texas Tech, which led to as many as 30 people associated with the program leaving.

He's spent the last four years at Ranger College, a junior college that he attended. Ranger was NJCAA national title runner-up during the 2018-19 and went 28-3 in 2019-20.

While Gillispie is awful at being a good human, his teams have tended to win more than lose. As Tarleton State moves to Division I and a place in the WAC, it's willing to dance with the devil to win basketball games.